To celebrate Vikings Live, we have replaced our Roman alphabet with the runic alphabet used by the Vikings, the Scandinavian ‘Younger Futhark’. The ‘Younger Futhark’ has only 16 letters, so we have used some of the runic letters more than once or combined two runes for one Roman letter.

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The original architectural layout of this house
has a number of features in common with New Kingdom Egyptian houses
more widely. The deposits, floors, finds and features excavated
within these spaces have challenged some of the more
architecturally-based assumptions we held about how different
areas of this house were used by its inhabitants, and have also
provided us with an interesting - if still not completely
understood - story of modification and adaptation over time.

Starting from the front of the house, a large space (D12.7.6)
was added outside the house’s original front door later in its
history, extending the residents’ property far into the adjacent
street D12.10. The room’s initial floor brick pavement was covered
by a series of sandy potsherd-rich deposits much like those in
D12.10; the space was almost certainly an unroofed courtyard and
seems to have acted in part as a dump for household rubbish. The
house’s new front entrance to the west of this courtyard was
enclosed by a low horseshoe-shaped retaining wall that contained an
exceptionally exciting find: the upended fragment of an inscribed
sandstone door lintel.

Aerial view of house D12.7 during
excavation

Sandstone door lintel

The find depicts a seated woman with a small monkey standing at
the foot of her chair and is part of a larger scene, the other
pieces of which are now either lost or remain unexcavated.
Significantly, the woman’s name is inscribed above her, providing
us with one of the very few examples of a named non-royal
individual that have so far been found at the site. This recycling
of inscribed stone architectural elements – in this case by being
built into a wall serving the more prosaic function of keeping
rising street deposits from entering the house – is a common
feature of later phase buildings at Amara West.

If the issue of rising street levels was a problem after
extension D12.7.6 was built, it was certainly already causing
difficulties earlier in the house’s history, when a retaining wall
and low staircase, continuously added to over time, lead down to
the original front doorway of the house. This entrance would have
originally been framed by sandstone doorjambs, which were both cut
out after the abandonment of D12.7 and probably reused elsewhere.
Happily, the doorway’s original stone threshold was still intact,
and proved to be another recycled piece of an inscribed stone door
lintel. This stone contained a small portion of a hieroglyphic
offering formula, as well as the highly worn traces of a possible
seated figure and chair in its centre.

Kitchen room with bread ovens

The house’s entrance room (D12.7.5) beyond this doorway would
have originally been a particularly impressive space, with a brick
paved floor and probably the only vaulted ceiling within the
building. This room also contained an entrance into the houses
kitchen - possibly a later addition to the house and blocked off in
the final phases of occupation. The kitchen contained four bread
ovens built over at least two construction phases. Next to this
oven room was a small annexe created by a flimsily constructed
wall, which contained the site’s first evidence of animal stabling,
in the form of preserved sheep or goat dung pellets and a thick
brown organic crust. Micromorphological investigation will allow us
to confirm if these deposits are the result of animals living in
the room, or perhaps relate instead to the storage of dung, which
may have been burnt as a fuel. At any rate the possible presence of
animals or animal waste next to a cooking area raises questions of
how residents’ health may have been impacted upon. It is also
interesting to consider that any animals kept in this room would
have been lead into and out of the house’s only entrance – its
formal stone front door – which was also used by the house’s
residents and any visitors.

Space D12.7.4, with pit in foreground
through room D12.7.9

This room lead into a long central space (D12.7.4), which was
equipped with a single grain grinding emplacement and contained a
thick sequence of sandy surfaces interleaved with numerous
water-laid silt lenses. This type of surface, which formed over an
original mud plaster floor, could be formed by the frequent
splashing of water over time, in order to keep down dust and form a
compact surface. The surface is suggestive of an outdoor space,
implying that instead of being an indoor room, D12.7.4 may instead
been an open or only partially roofed internal courtyard.

As well as leading into the rear suite of the house, one end of
D12.7.4 contained a doorway leading into a room containing nothing
except an enormously large hole! Similarly arranged houses at Amara
would strongly suggest that this room (D12.7.9) originally
contained a staircase, providing access to an upper story or roof.
Mud bricks were frequently dug out of the site in later times to be
used as fertiliser or building materials, and a dense brick
staircase would certainly have been a tempting target to these
people, who have thoroughly removed any trace of its existence!

An unusual feature of D12.7 is the way in which all internal
doorways – the majority of which had outward facing ‘insets’ that
may have originally accommodated stone doorjambs or even wooden
doors – were at some point in the house’s history all modified by
the construction of one or two small walls within these insets. Was
this the result of changing architectural fashions, the desire to
reuse architectural elements elsewhere, or perhaps the intentional
narrowing of doors in an effort to restrict the amount of light or
wind entering rooms?

Hole cut into door-passage, with ceramic
jar buried inside

This is not the only enigmatic aspect of D12.7’s doorways. Three
roughly arm-length holes were found cut into the bases of walls,
either in or immediately next to these entrances (more may still
remain to be discovered, hidden behind the doorway modification
walls mentioned above). One of these holes contained a small intact
jar, laid upon its side with its mouth facing outwards. The burial
of infants or foetuses in pots is known from other New Kingdom
sites, but this vessel was filled only with windblown sand; its
original significance to those who placed it here remains
mysterious.

Room D12.7.1, with mastaba-bench at the
back.

One of the most intriguing results of the season’s excavations
has come from the most ‘formal’ room of the house, D12.7.1, which
is furnished with a long, low mastaba seating platform, hard mud
plaster floor, central hearth and a dado of white wall plaster (an
arrangement similar to rooms in
house E13.7, for example). Towards the north of this room we
found an enigmatic installation (12068) not yet attested at either
Amara West (and I have yet to find parallels from other New Kingdom
town siites), formed of a mud plastered lower basin connected by a
small channel to an upper basin. This upper basin contains a
distinctive torus or ‘donut’ shaped basket impression flanked by
two ceramic pot stand impressions, all made when the mud floor
these objects sat upon was wet.

Feature 12068 in room D12.7.1

The exact function of feature 12068 is unclear, but its use does
seem to have involved water – probably stored in ceramic vessels
sitting upon these pot stands and then perhaps directed into or
over the basket before being drained into the installation’s lower
basin. It is uncertain what substances, if any, might have been put
inside this basket, but a clue is provided by the lenses of red
pigment deposited in the lower basin and also splashed upon the
floor and walls around the feature. It seems plausible then that
12068 functioned as a pigment processing and mixing installation,
although it may also have served other purposes that are for now
less clear to us.

Due to its height above the rest of the room’s floor, we first
thought that 10268 must be a late addition to the room, perhaps
built once the presumably more formal original functions of this
room had ceased to be as important. However, a sondage through the
floor of D12.7.1 has partially revealed an earlier basin (12164),
sitting on the earliest exposed floor of this room and adjoined by
another torus-shaped basket impression. The apparently long-term
presence of these installations, which could be linked to
household-based craft or decorative activities, challenges our
existing understanding of these ‘formal’ rooms, implying that a
more multifunctional use of space may have been the norm at Amara
West – even in quite large houses such as D12.7. As always, this
prompts the difficult but important question of what else might
have gone on within house rooms that has not left such obvious and
well preserved traces, a problem that I will continue to address
over the course of my PhD research
through the micromorphological and geochemical analysis of this and
other houses’ floor deposits.

Space D12.7.1 was flanked by a pair of similarly sized long and
narrow rooms, reminiscent of the official storage magazines found
within the town walls at Amara West. The northernmost of this pair
(D12.7.3) in particular contained many flat stone slabs upon the
floor, which may have been used as termite-proof bases on which to
sit perishable items or wooden objects. Most evocative of storage
were the many clay seal impressions found embedded in the soft
silty floor of the southernmost of these rooms (D12.7.2),
suggesting that this household participated in the town’s wider
elite or official storage and sealing practices. The house also
yielded impressions of larger stamps, some with royal names upon
them. Back in D12.7.2, we were also lucky enough to get a glimpse
further back in time, with a set of garden plots unexpectedly
appearing just beneath the floor of this room, pointing to an
agricultural use of the land later built over by this house.

Some work still remains to be done in D12.7. It is particularly
important for our understanding of the house’s means of production
and self-sufficiency to know whether the cooking facilities found
in D12.7.7 were an originally planned part of the house or not. We
also need to know how long these ovens were used for before the
room and its neighbour D12.7.8 were eventually sealed off for good.
Future excavations outside the house should also help to reveal
D12.7’s temporal relationship with its neighbour D12.6 and a series
of other houses to the north, helping us to build up a better
picture of urban development in this area of the town. In addition,
the ceramic assemblage, artefacts and other samples will need to be
analysed, to provide more insights into life in the ancient house,
when it was created (we provisionally date it to the late 19th or
early 20th dynasty, around 1170BC) and when it was finally
abandoned.

While house D12.7 has not given up all of its secrets, the 2014
excavations here have provided a detailed insight into the history
and use of a large house at Amara West, showing in particular how
what may at first appear to be a relatively standard architectural
configuration can be modified and adapted over time – or perhaps
even from the outset – to suit the needs and lifeways of its
inhabitants.